Botanical Thoughts 2009–2013 by Olivia Parker

Botanical Thoughts 2009–2013 by Olivia Parker

Photographer Olivia Parker has continuously pursued her creative vision through the genre of still-life photography for more than thirty-five years. Parker’s photographs combine everyday objects within the traditional framework of Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish painters of the seventeenth century. For Parker, the genre has historically combined intriguing elements of the expected and the unexpected, calmly and potently affirming the impermanence of life.

A former painter, Parker became intrigued with photography in 1970. She is captivated by how photography, unlike painting, “forces you to reach out to the world in front of you.” Parker’s self-taught aesthetic sensibility compels her to investigate what the camera reveals by using ephemeral constructions to photograph and experiment with the endless possibilities of light. 

In 1996, Parker received a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. She has attended residencies at Dartmouth College in 1988, the MacDowell Colony in 1993, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1997.

Olivia Parker has exhibited in the United States and abroad, and she is represented in major private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Portfolios of her work have been published in Art News, American Photographer, Camera, and Camera Arts. Monographs of her work include Signs of Life (Godine, 1978), Under the Looking Glass (New York Graphic Society, 1983), and Weighing The Planets (New York Graphic Society, 1987).  

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